Four Patches Released By Real Network For Critical Bugs in Multimedia Player

RealNetworks has issued four critical patches for several versions of its RealPlayer running on Windows, Linux and Apple's Mac OS X.The flaws could allow a hacker to run malicious code on a PC or cause the computer to reveal information, according to an advisory from Secunia, a security vendor based in Denmark.

RealPlayer is an application that plays audio and video streamed over the Internet.

RealNetworks has published a table detailing which vulnerabilities affect certain player versions on the different platforms. Some users will need to download an entire new version of the application, while others may be able to just download patches.

One of the problems involves the handling of frames in SWF (Shockwave Flash) files due to a design error, which can cause a heap-based buffer overflow, Secunia said.

Another problem causes a stack-based buffer overflow when a media file is imported using an ActiveX control, Microsoft's technology that adds extra functionality to Web pages.

A third flaw is described by RealPlayer as allowing local resources to be accessed. The fourth also involves ActiveX, where a timing issue with "Controls", "Console", or "WindowName" properties can be maliciously manipulated to corrupt RealPlayer's memory, Secunia said.

Secunia ranked the flaws as "highly critical," the vendor's second-highest ranking of risk. The flaws were found by Peter Vreugdenhil, Elazar Broad, Dyon Balding of Secunia and another anonymous researcher, Secunia said.

Logo Design Studio Pro improves SVG support

Macware on Friday announced the release of Logo Design Studio Pro 1.8, an update to their logo design software for Mac OS X users. It costs $59.99, though updates for registered users are free.

Logo Design Studio Pro helps users looking for a creative logo to add to their stationery or corporate letterhead with more than 500 pre-designed logo templates. It sports Bezier curve-based editing tools, Boolean operations, more than 100 filters, alignment tools and other capabilities suitable for design environments.

New to this release is improved support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with more than 1,300 pre-designed SVG logo objects; a new browser to preview each SVG object in categories; and some bug fixes and enhancements.

System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4 or later, 256MB RAM and 550MB hard disk space.

MS Office for Mac Sales Soar, VBA Support To Return

Apple is selling more Macintosh computers than ever before -- and that's having unexpected benefits for Microsoft. Sales of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac are triple the volume for the previous 2004 version of the productivity software and are the highest in the product's history, Microsoft announced Tuesday."The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac business unit at Microsoft. The 2008 version launched at the MacWorld show this year.

"As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and will also expand our staff to ensure that Office for Mac remains the most powerful and compatible productivity suite for Mac customers," Eisler said.

SP1 Released

Microsoft also released Service Pack 1 for the Mac Office suite, featuring "suitewide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements."

SP1 addresses compatibility issues between the Mac and Windows versions of Excel; improves Entourage support for Exchange Server, including the ability to remove attachments from Exchange messages and synchronizing to the server; and provides minor improvements for Word and PowerPoint.

Bloggers said the most notable addition in SP1 is support for Excel chart-formatting options that were available in previous versions of Office.

VBA Support To Return

Microsoft also said it will bring back Visual Basic for Applications support to the Mac in the next version of Office for Mac. A press release said Microsoft "recognizes that VBA language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms." The prior version supported AppleScript and the Automator scripting tool.

The removal of VB was not due to any of the "conspiracy theories" floated around, such as that Microsoft was trying to "slowly kill the Mac" or drive users to Windows versions of the software, Erik Schwiebert, a software design lead in Microsoft's Mac business unit, wrote on his blog. The decision was driven by the technical difficulties of including VB for the latest version of Apple's operating system, he wrote.

While technical challenges remain, "for a while now I and several others have been working with a group of people who know a heck of a lot about the internals of VB," Schwiebert wrote, "and once we determined that we could achieve the revival of VB in the new schedule for the next version of Mac Office, we locked it into place on the feature list."

The high volume of sales for the current version indicates that a lack of VBA support isn't a big deal for most Mac users, Schwiebert said. As to when the next version will be released, the developer assured readers it will be less that four years.

Apple Reportedly Agrees To Refunds In Mac-User Suit

Apple has reportedly agreed to give refunds of $25 to $79 in cash to as many as 2.3 million Mac users who bought replacement power adapters for the PowerBook and iBook, court documents revealed Friday.
The refund is part of Apple's proposed settlement of a class-action suit filed in 2006 over spark-prone adapters that shipped with the Mac computers. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., federal Judge James Ware gave preliminary approval March 24 to the agreement reached with plaintiffs, BloombergNews reported.

The suit claimed that Apple misrepresented problems with the adapters, the news agency said. The Mac maker recalled 570,000 of the devices, and offered replacements at no charge. A hearing on final approval of the deal is scheduled for Sept. 8, Bloomberg said.

The settlement was the second reported this week involving an Apple product. Apple Canada offered a total of $3.54 million (U.S.) in credits to Canadian iPod owners, in order to settle two lawsuits over the battery life of the portable music players.

The credits are being offered to owners of first-, second-, or third-generation iPods bought before June 24, 2004, The Gazette newspaper in Montreal reported. The lawsuits, one filed in Montreal and the other in Toronto, claimed that the rechargeable batteries in the devices died after three hours of use, while Apple advertised the iPods as running for eight hours between charges.

As many as 80,000 Canadians could be eligible for a credit, lawyer Philippe Trudel, who represented the plaintiff in the Montreal suit, told the newspaper. The credit of $44 (U.S.) per person would be usable at Apple's online store.

Apple has had to deal with other marketing-related lawsuits this year. In March, a class-action suit filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., accused the company of deceptively marketing its 20-inch iMacs by grossly inflating the capabilities of the monitor. The plaintiffs claimed the monitors were inferior to previous generations of displays. The suit is pending.

A new day for Macs in the enterprise?

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone was ready for enterprise use, the announcement caused a stir that few of the world's iconic businessmen could match. It seemed that everyone from rank-and-file worker-bees to CEOs wanted to get their corporate applications served up on the hot new device. Why? This was Apple -- a synonym for awe-inspiring design and coolness, the antithesis to stodgy old corporate technology that burns the eyes red and freezes computers blue.

But some Apple-watchers and evangelist IT practitioners who use Macs for business think the announcement runs deeper than the iPhone itself in its importance. Some believe it could usher in the era of a more enterprise-friendly Apple.

Such a paradigm shift, they argue, could serve as the final ingredient in the boiling cauldron being stirred by employees at the edge of organizations who have become dissatisfied with corporate technology and who have turned to innovative options in the consumer space to meet their needs.

Some tall hurdles related to converting an enterprise from PCs to Macs, of course, have been around for years. Many corporate IT departments find themselves beholden to decisions made by predecessors during the 1990s, when PCs and the Microsoft Windows operating system seized a chokehold on the corporate market. Companies planned everything from back-end servers to client software based on a Microsoft framework, notes Roger Kay, an analyst with EndPoint Technologies.

Integrating Mac equipment and other Apple products into such an environment requires time and money. "Despite the hairiness of Microsoft software, most companies crave compatibility with it," Kay says. "They have these existing investments that they want to get use of."

But a move to Web-based software, where users need nothing but a browser to access their applications, could alleviate the IT hang-up on integration.

Employees have been leading this movement. Instead of using the corporate-sanctioned software on their workstations, many have gravitated to technologies like wikis, blogs, and social networks to collaborate on projects horizontally, without IT's help or blessing. In the CIO Consumer Technology survey , the 311 IT decision makers surveyed conceded that nearly 25 percent of their employees use social networks for work purposes, while 21 percent utilize wikis and another 17 percent use blogs.

From a hardware perspective, Macs have increasingly become more people's brand of choice. Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs in the first quarter of 2008, which represented a 44 percent unit growth for the product and helped Apple realize 47 percent revenue growth compared to the same quarter the year before.

But businesses' adoption of Macs and Apple software has still been sluggish, perhaps, in part, due to this being a low priority for Apple.

While Apple of course deals with businesses, and has a business team at some of its stores, it undoubtedly remains a consumer-oriented company, by the numbers. Its iPod claims around 70 percent of the market share for MP3 players. Apple sold 22.1 million iPods in the first quarter of 2008. On average, the company says, an iPod has been sold every 1.7 seconds in the five-and-half-year life span of the product.

And evangelists who run Mac shops in SMBs say their experiences, not as dissimilar to those of large enterprises as you might believe, still demonstrate a mixed bag of results for those using Apple in the corporate setting.

The wholesale switch
Shani Magosky, chief operating officer (with IT responsibilities) of Jaffe Associates, a 25-person marketing and public relations firm, didn't need the iPhone to embrace Apple.

Magosky started looking into Macs for her traditionally PC and Windows-based company back in the fall of 2006, she says. She wasn't necessarily wooed by Bono singing in an iPod commercial. She was sick of PCs breaking all the time, she says. Then there was the "sticker shock" of learning what it would cost her to upgrade to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software (and the accompanying server technology).

Specifically, she'd been running an outdated version of Microsoft's terminal server, which allowed her employees (all of whom work remotely, as Jaffe has no central office) to connect to the network and share files. "It was unnecessarily slow and unreliable," she says. "We ended up spending a fortune on IT trouble-shooting."

With her terminal server being outdated, she was told the best option would be to upgrade to SharePoint, which, after purchasing and installing the server, buying the software licenses and all the support surrounding it, would have cost $100,000, Magosky says. "They nickel and dime you," she says.

Meanwhile, PCs became a costly problem. Between what Magosky views as poor manufacturing and tons of malware permeating the layer Windows leaves between the Web and the network, the PCs began to break with great frequency, she says. "There is just so much that can go wrong with them. All these viruses happen to PCs that don't happen to Macs. And then it costs you more to fix it than just buying a new one. So I said I wasn't going to waste anymore, and went out and bought a MacBook Pro."

Perhaps serendipitously, right around this time, her boss, President and CEO Jay Jaffe, was on vacation with his daughter in San Francisco and visited Apple's flagship store on Stockton Street. "He bought an iPod touch that he was infatuated with," says Magosky. "When he was there, he talked to the business team. They convinced him there was nothing we needed to do now that we couldn't do with them [Apple]."

Before long, Magosky set about switching her entire shop over to Macs. Since Jaffe Associates serves the legal industry, which makes wide use of Microsoft software, Jaffe began using Office 2008 for Macs. The company also chose Apple's Kerio software for e-mail, Entourage for archiving, and Apple's Xserve server for back-end storage of data. Magosky predicts that Jaffe will realize a savings of 50 percent in maintenance costs due to the Apple switch, which will pay for the hardware and implementation of Apple products in the first year, she says.

Third-party Mac support, by the hour, remains more costly than Windows support. But, Magosky says, her total amount of required support time has dropped so substantially that she's gaining that 50 percent in savings.

"It's going to increase the efficiency of our staff tremendously," she says. "On top of the hard dollar savings, it's going to free me up to do other, more value-added things." What about those cool iPhones? While Jaffe's users primarily use RIM BlackBerry devices for mobile needs, Magosky says that she might consider iPhones down the road, if enough users call for them.

Hurdles remain
Ditching PCs at a 25-person company is one thing. But introducing Apple to a large enterprise with legacy systems is quite another. Even some enterprises who've been managing mixed Mac and PC environments for years say that Apple still has some work to do.

Rob Israel, manager of desktop support at Digitas, a New York-based ad agency, says that 30 percent of his company runs Macs. Israel, who manages some 600 Macs across the enterprise, says that a hybrid environment of Macs and Windows can have its pitfalls, technologically and culturally.

"We barely deploy Apple servers here even though the culture has become Macintosh friendly," he says. "There is still a sense in the IT department that we are a Windows shop, and why bother complicating things by introducing more platforms."

The IT shop runs four Apple Xserves, one of which is used to host Filemaker Pro.

While Israel describes the company's relationship with Apple in terms of contracts as "great," the arrangement leaves some things to be desired, he says. "Apple does not provide technology roadmaps, which enterprise IT departments obviously need," he says. "What's worse, they make their hardware incompatible with the previous version of the operating system, and their schedule is impossible to keep up with."

For instance, Israel says Digitas can't deploy new versions of Leopard, Mac's operating system, as quickly as Apple demands. Every time Apple moves to the next version of an OS, Israel says, Digitas ends up having six months where they're forced to buy out-of-date equipment to stay compatible with the old OS. "We have complained about this for the last four years," he explains. "They [Apple] do not have any motivation to design their new hardware to support an old OS, so they won't."

Not quite a tipping point
Apple's buzz could hardly be louder. But have we now reached a time when many large enterprises can consider doing a rip and replace, swapping PCs for Macs? Not likely, says Kay.

Even if a progressive CIO who felt his or her company had sunk too much money into Windows wanted to switch wholesale, gaining the initial capital to get the job done, especially as the economy tightens, could be difficult, he says. "It's hard to see a time when you can change the paradigm that much for computing," Kay says.

For now, the iPhone might just be the starting point where businesses dip their toes in the Apple pool to see if the enterprise experience improves.

At New York Media (publishers of New York magazine and NYMag.com), Albert C. Lee, director of IT, says he has used Macs for some employees in the organization but has run into problems with service-level agreements. But that's not going to stop him from potentially adding iPhones to the enterprise when it the capability to access e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange server becomes possible in June.

"A good majority of our enterprise users already have an iPhone for a personal communications device," he says. "The idea of empowering a large population of your corporate users with enterprise push e-mail and remote calendar management, especially when they had none before, is pretty attractive."